Intel unveiled plans Monday to take supercomputing performance to levels that are orders of magnitude greater than currently possible by the end of the decade. Coincidentally, the news broke just after Japan's K supercomputer had been named the world's fastest, with over three times the processing power as the previous title holder, China's Tianhe-1A system.

The power of supercomputers shows no signs of abating. Intel said its new Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture will deliver exaflop-scale supercomputing by 2018, with the fastest supercomputers reaching up to 4 exaflops of performance by 2020.